1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an interface circuit, and particularly relates to a peripheral interface circuit for accessing a peripheral memory.
2. Description of Related Art
The growth of digital cameras, mobile phones, and MP3 players has been rapid in recent years. Consequently, the consumers' demand for storage media has increased tremendously. Since the rewritable non-volatile memory has the characteristics such as its data non-volatility, lower power consumption, smaller volume, non-mechanical structure, and fast read and write speeds, the rewritable non-volatile memory fits portable electronic products, such as laptop computers, very well. The flash drive is a portable storage device using flash memory as the storage medium. Thus, the flash memory has become an important part of the electronic industries and has been broadly used as peripheral memory.
Generally speaking, a host end connects the peripheral memory to access data through a peripheral interface circuit by adopting a suitable peripheral interface standard. Also, to facilitate a speed of accessing data, the peripheral interface circuit usually has a first-in first-out (FIFO) buffer storing pre-fetched data and having an access speed faster than that of the peripheral memory. However, if the addresses of accessed data are not continuous, some of the pre-fetched data may need to be removed from the FIFO buffer even they would be accessed in a short time. Thus, the overall data access speed is reduced. Besides, the identification of the connected peripheral memory is performed by the peripheral interface circuit in related art. In this way, the peripheral interface circuit may not recognize a new peripheral memory after it is implemented.